in her sex.  The fabric of her life, of all that constituted her, quivered and grew tremulous.  The thought fluttered in her mind like a flame-attracted moth.  She went so far as to imagine Martin proposing, herself putting the words into his mouth; and she rehearsed her refusal, tempering it with kindness and exhorting him to true and noble manhood.  And especially he must stop smoking cigarettes.  She would make a point of that.  But no, she must not let him speak at all.  She could stop him, and she had told her mother that she would.  All flushed and burning, she regretfully dismissed the conjured situation.  Her first proposal would have to be deferred to a more propitious time and a more eligible suitor.

CHAPTER XXI

Came a beautiful fall day, warm and languid, palpitant with the hush of the changing season, a California Indian summer day, with hazy sun and wandering wisps of breeze that did not stir the slumber of the air.  Filmy purple mists, that were not vapors but fabrics woven of color, hid in the recesses of the hills.  San Francisco lay like a blur of smoke upon her heights.  The intervening bay was a dull sheen of molten metal, whereon sailing craft lay motionless or drifted with the lazy tide.  Far Tamalpais, barely seen in the silver haze, bulked hugely by the Golden Gate, the latter a pale gold pathway under the westering sun.  Beyond, the Pacific, dim and vast, was raising on its sky-line tumbled cloud-masses that swept landward, giving warning of the first blustering breath of winter.

The erasure of summer was at hand.  Yet summer lingered, fading and fainting among her hills, deepening the purple of her valleys, spinning a shroud of haze from waning powers and sated raptures, dying with the calm content of having lived and lived well.  And among the hills, on their favorite knoll, Martin and Ruth sat side by side, their heads bent over the same pages, he reading aloud from the love-sonnets of the woman who had loved Browning as it is given to few men to be loved.

But the reading languished.  The spell of passing beauty all about them was too strong.  The golden year was dying as it had lived, a beautiful and unrepentant voluptuary, and reminiscent rapture and content freighted heavily the air.  It entered into them, dreamy and languorous, weakening the fibres of resolution, suffusing the face of morality, or of judgment, with haze and purple mist.  Martin felt tender and melting, and from time to time warm glows passed over him.  His head was very near to hers, and when wandering phantoms of breeze stirred her hair so that it touched his face, the printed pages swam before his eyes.

“I don’t believe you know a word of what you are reading,” she said once when he had lost his place.

He looked at her with burning eyes, and was on the verge of becoming awkward, when a retort came to his lips.